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Futuristic Scifi scene set in a Science Fiction city landscape.

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Project Description

I started this one quite a while ago. Early 2015 I think. I kept it laying around, not really sure what to do with it. AURORA – a collaborational effort of both artgroups The Luminarium & The Cosmosys Collective to do a crossover exhibit, made me go back to it and add some final touches. I’m glad it got accepted into the exhibit and sits along some fantastic work by artists from around the world.

Starting

I had this project laying around on my harddrive for a long time, before I got back to it, to give it final touches for the artgroup release. As far as I can recall, I initially just had some fun with a ship design. That design would eventually become the centerpiece of the scene. I liked the look of it and decided to play around and build a city around it. While doing that I got hit with additional sparks of creativity. That spawned the idea of the larger ship in the medium background, that is undergoing a docking procedure. The blue holograms surrounding it are there to help with the process and make the ship dock correctly. Loved that idea and could have easily made that part the hero part of the scene. However, I think I managed to balance the attention, between the small ship in front and the docking ship, out nicely. Although I must admit that the composition in this piece is kind of all over the place.

Vue render pass for the city.

Render pass for the ships. Notice that the docking ship is not yet in the scene and was also rendered separately.

The separate render pass for the docking ship.

One of many additional details that were rendered in separate passes.

Setup

The scene setup happened in Vue. For the city I used kitbashing and threw together some stuff I had from previous projects. As you can see in the examples above, there was not a single render of the scene. To keep the most freedom in the creative process I rendered several elements in separate passes. Rendering was done with additional diffuse, shadow, specular etc passes, which helped me to create detail in areas that needed a little more punch in the final scene. Ultimately I ended up putting much more detail into the scene than what I originally planned. I think it paid off and I'm fairly happy with the result.

‘Take It Into Photoshop’

As usual the magic first really started to happen in Photoshop. There I puzzled together all the separate renders. A lot of fixing, overpainting and detailing happened there. I really wanted to push the atmosphere and lighting and think I managed to pull off a nice job in these departments. As stated earlier I did not want to go for super detail in this one and made the picture part of my Comcept series. A series devoted to more experimental and rought stuff. It evolved however and since I was liking what I managed to come up with I decided to go the extra mile for the additional detail.

The Final

Before I called the piece final I went into Adobe Lightroom to play around with the colours a little more. Although I must say that the atmosphere in the Photoshop version works really nice as well. I love to play with colours though and couldn't resist. Both versions work good enough. With the Lightroomed version having a little more visual punch.